72 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. 



shelter and bring up their young ; in the close copse or mossy orchard 

 they cower from the noonday heat ; and return again and again, in 

 spite of the persecutions they meet with at his hands, to heighten his 

 enjoyments, to cheer his social hours, and renew the sentiments of 

 past delight. In the lonely mere, and over the dark moorland, hover 

 many birds, but they are such as only hoot and scream ; and where 

 the wild waves play together fly seabirds, whose only language is a 

 dismal shriek. 



Nature pushes up towards the region of poetry in sound as she does 

 in colour. As she weaves rainbows from the fragments of a falling 

 cloud, so she struggles to weave music from every voice of animate 

 and inanimate things. The wind howls in the November branches, 

 but sings amid the shrubby foliage of June ; the rivulet makes a 

 whizzing sound while creeping through the matted sedge, but laughs 

 like a merry maiden when it sparkles among the yellow pebbles, and 

 tinkles like a bell when it beats upon a fallen rock. 



It is because music stands above all the utilities of sound, — because 

 it appeals to the sentiments of men, because it is soul claiming 

 kindred with soul, that man has loved it first among the spiritual 

 possessions of the world, and has sought in its voice an answer to his 

 longings for the good and fair. Nowhere upon the face of all the 

 world is to be found a people in whose hearts music has not a wel- 

 come. The rude Indian stands upon the shelly beach and listens in 

 love to the singing of the waves. He suspends the hollow shell upon 

 the delicate fibre of the palm, and strikes it with his hand, that it may 

 give forth song. He fashions the marsh reed or the stem of grass 

 into a flute, and enchants his listening children with its voice. And 

 when the toils of the chace are done, he gathers together his fellow 

 huntsmen, and in the purple of the evening air they sing together 

 their songs of joy. 



It was the consciousness of imion between the soul of man and the 

 soul of song which begot those lovely conceits of antiquity which 

 represented nature as a musical or rhythmic harmony* Plato said, 

 the soul of man was itself a harmony, and had its nearest sympathies 

 in music. Bolder still was the sage of Samos, when he said that the 

 orbs of heaven were so harmonious in their motions that it must be 

 accompanied by ravishing songs, — that the worlds warble in their 

 ceaseless march, while the blue deeps beat back the chorus and repeat 

 the echo of their psalms. 



